In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews several companies from the International Conferences on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) showcase. The companies span the following applications: mobile robots for military and commercial uses, warehouse solutions, robotic arms and manipulators, and robotic systems to assist surgery.

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first computer programmer, and heralded symbolic logic by demonstrating future applications for the universal computing machine that Charles Babbage proposed. She was exceptional in her era for her mathematical brilliance, but though she imagined future applications for a multitude of technological innovations, women at that time were not encouraged to speak about or publish their work, so Lovelace’s genius was appended as ‘notes’ onto the work of others and not seen as a major contribution in its own right.

The fact that the contributions of women such as Lovelace have not been celebrated until recently gives us cause to remedy the situation. Now in its third year, our list of ‘25 Women in Robotics You Need to Know About’ is both a shoutout and a call to look at what all these women in robotics have achieved!

In this new lecture series, controls expert Brian Douglas walks you through key concepts in control system theory. Focused on making control theory accessible and intuitive, this series is for anyone who wants to relate control concepts to robotic applications in the real world.

In this episode, Audrow Nash interviews Sangbae Kim, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), at the International Conference of Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2015. They speak about an electrically-powered quadruped called the Cheetah 2.

In Part Five of our ICRAcam series, you’ll learn about passively stabilizing MAVs without using inertial sensors, a robot that learns different swimming gaits from experience, building high level motor tasks from a library of basic motion and transition primitives, and a high-speed robotic system for injecting C. elegans for large scale biomolecule screening. A special thanks to IEEE RAS ICRA, who allowed us to film at the event to bring you highlights from some of this year’s exciting papers. We’ll be sharing the final ICRAcam videos soon, so watch this space! Check out all our ICRA coverage here.

In Part Four of our ICRAcam series, you’ll learn about control for a microsurgical device for soft tissue, a robot that can find wrinkles in clothing and straighten them out, collaborative task learning and 3D scene reconstruction. A special thanks to IEEE RAS ICRA, who allowed us to film at the event to bring you highlights from some of this year’s exciting papers. We’ll be sharing lots more ICRAcam videos over the next couple of weeks, so watch this space! Check out all our ICRA coverage here.

In Part Three of our ICRAcam series, you’ll learn about what it takes to get a robot to build IKEA furniture, information processing for robot perception, an MRI-powered millibot that shoots like a Gauss Gun to make tiny holes for surgical applications, and coordinated motion and contact in HRI. A special thanks to IEEE RAS ICRA, who allowed us to film at the event to bring you highlights from some of this year’s exciting papers. We’ll be sharing lots more ICRAcam videos over the next couple of weeks, so watch this space! Check out all our ICRA coverage here.

Thanks to IEEE RAS ICRA, who allowed us to film at the event, we’ve got some more highlights from some of this year’s exciting papers. We’ll be sharing lots more ICRAcam videos over the next couple of weeks, so watch this space! In Part Two: cooperative handheld robots, reconfigurable magnetic manipulation in medical robotics, mini robotic probes for surgery, and a new approach to the Butterfly Robot benchmark. Check out all our ICRA coverage here.

There was so much great research presented at ICRA in Seattle this year that it was tough to find the time to see it all. Thanks to IEEE RAS ICRA, who allowed us to film at the event, we are able to bring you highlights from some of this year’s exciting papers. We’ll be sharing lots more ICRAcam videos over the next couple of weeks, so watch this space! In Part One: Adhesion grippers, robots life cycles, car-towing bots, and motion planning in uncertainty.

Capturing and processing camera and sensor data and recognizing various shapes to determine a set of robotic actions is conceptually easy. Yet Amazon challenged the industry to do a selecting and picking task robotically and 28 teams from around the world rose to it.

The Amazon Picking Challenge is over and two things stood out. One: how many different arm gripper solutions were possible; and two: just how difficult the challenge still is. The gap between the top two teams and the other 26 teams was significant, with Team RBO scoring 148 points, Team MIT scoring 88 points and Team Grizzly next best with 35 points.

ICRA is the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society’s flagship conference and a premier international forum for robotics researchers to present their work. The 2015 conference is taking place 26-30 May, at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, Washington, USA.